Frank Girardot: Flappy Bird might be the weekend’s biggest story

The most important news story of the past weekend didn’t involve the Winter Olympics in Sochi.

Yes, the USA has been successful and yes, Russia is mostly a backwater cesspool — but isn’t that a given?

Nor this the weekend’s biggest story detail the horrific and tragic deaths of six people who were killed in a head-on collision on the westbound 60 Freeway in Diamond Bar. That story is age old. Drinking and driving kills. Don’t get in the car with a drunk. Don’t drive drunk. Period. End of story.

Don’t get me wrong both items are serious and deserving of front page play. And, in fact, both appeared on page A1 of this newspaper.

Without diminishing either of those events, one could argue — based on placement in major media around the world — that the news story most likely to affect a broad swath of readers (online and in print) was the sudden disappearance of Flappy Birds from both the Google Play and iTunes app stores.

Don’t know about Flappy Birds? I’ll forgive you, but my assumption is that you are still using a typewriter and a fax machine and were probably born sometime before 1940.

That’s just an assumption though. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.

For reasons that remain unclear, Flappy Birds creator Dong Nguyen announced Saturday he would no longer market Flappy Birds. There would be no updates. And no way to download it on new Android devices or iPhones.

Poof, the most popular download on either platform was gone in a heartbeat.

“Press people are overrating the success ... It is something I never want. Please give me peace.”

And there was this one: “I can call ‘Flappy Bird’ is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it.”

Oh yeah. What is Flappy Birds?

Flappy Birds is a video game. In concept, it may be the simplest video game of all time. Your task is to tap your finger and fly a bird through an obstacle course of pipes that look like they’ve been lifted from the Mario Bros.

Hit a pipe, game over.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it. The game records your score and you start over.

And over. And over. And over, until you are bored or you’ve beaten your previous high score. It’s genius really.

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I once scored a 23 on Flappy Birds. That beat my previous high of 17, which bested my original high score of 7. Big deal.

Don’t ask me how I got to 23, because there is no good way to explain it.

And there’s no reason why anyone should care. But we do.

I imagine it’s that personal tie we all have to our phones that gave the Flappy Birds story some heft and social media cache. We can relate to it in ways that we can’t relate to Slopestyle skiing or that moment — that blink of an eye — that takes out an entire family.

I think we can all deal with the loss of Flappy Birds and get on with our lives.

Frank Girardot is senior editor of the San Gabriel Valley Newspapers and the author of “Name Dropper: Investigating the Clark Rockefeller Mystery.”